I’ve gotten three flat tires in the past year. All three were because I wasn’t paying attention and drilled a curb.
“Your mother is here—that’s awesome.”
We pulled into my dad’s driveway and I felt queasy when I saw my mom’s car, parked a little off-kilter next to the curb as if she’d squealed onto the block and sprinted to the house from her vehicle.
Inside, she was standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed, and the second we entered, her long index finger pointed directly at me. Her teeth were gritted and she said, “Emilie Elizabeth, go get whatever you need from your room. You are coming home with me. Now!”
“For God’s sake, Beth, can you settle down for a minute?” My dad dumped his keys on the counter and looked exhausted. I felt guilty for making him worry, especially since he’d refused to talk to me in the car.
The minute we’d walked out of my grandma’s I’d managed to get out the word “I’m” before he barked, “Don’t talk to me right now, Em.”
I’d spent the rest of the three-minute drive thinking of all the things I’d done on the DONC. It seemed fuzzy after the multiple Valentine’s Days, and I wasn’t 100 percent sure it all had really and truly happened.
Because it couldn’t all have happened, right? I mean, repeating days didn’t exist in real life. Surely there was some other explanation. Maybe it’d been a dream on top of a dream, like a dream about repeating days.
“Are you kidding me? Settle down?” My mom’s eyes were narrowed and she was ready to fight. She was wearing tartan plaid flannel Ralph Lauren pajamas, and her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. The faint smell of her moisturizer cream wafted across the kitchen and hit me with a one-two punch of nervous dread and homesick longing. “I have a hard time settling down when your lax parenting led to our daughter misbehaving at school and not coming home last night.”
“Shh.” Lisa, who was sitting in a chair at the table, moved her hands like she was patting the air to remind everyone that the boys were sleeping.
“Oh, come on, you know I’m not a lax parent.” My dad lowered his voice and dragged a hand through his messy hair. “Emilie is a teenager. Teenagers make stupid decisions sometimes. Just because she did does not mean that—”
“Yes, it does!”
“You guys—shhh!” Lisa pointed upstairs, where the twins slept.
“No, it goddamn doesn’t,” he whisper-yelled. “I know you’re perfect, Beth, but the rest of us—including our daughter—are not. Can you just be reasonable—”
“Don’t you dare call me unreasonable when you couldn’t find her!”
“Shhh!”
“You shh, Lisa—Christ!” My mom gave up on volume control and barked at me, “Go get your things now; tomorrow—today—is my day, regardless of this bullshit.”
I was still just standing right inside the door, paralyzed by their fighting. I glanced at my dad and he gave a terse nod, so I ran up to my room. I blinked fast and tried not to cry as I jammed clothes into my backpack; I was way too old to cry about parents fighting, right?
It was just that it’d been a while since they’d had a big fight. And I hated when I was the cause and they talked about me like I wasn’t there. Like I was an object they were arguing over instead of the kid they were supposed to love.
Thankfully, I discovered early on that I had the power to extinguish many of their Em-related disagreements. By bending over backward to please whichever one of them was aggressively upset, I was often able to curtail the fight.
My superpower, if you will.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to help me—at all. Not this time.
I ran down the stairs, and the second I walked into the kitchen my mom said—
“I will be at my lawyer’s the second his office opens, Tom. I’m filing to amend our custody arrangement because there’s no way in hell I’m letting her visit you in Texas after this.”
“I haven’t even had a chance to tell her—”
“Good.”
“Beth.” His breath hissed through his teeth. “You are out of your mind if you think Em forgetting to text me is grounds for an amendment.”
From upstairs, and through the monitor on the kitchen table, Logan’s sleepy wail rang out. Lisa glared at both of my parents for a second but then swung her gaze to me, accusing me of once again screwing everything up before she stood and marched up the stairs.
Logan’s cry got louder through the monitor, and the three of us kind of just stared at it for a second, listening.
“Come on, Emilie.” My mom had her keys in her hand. “We’re leaving.”
“Um.” I cleared my throat. “I’ll be right out. I just need to grab one more thing.”
“You have one minute.”
She went out the door, and I turned to my dad. “I’ll talk to her. I’ll make her—”
He held up a hand. “Just go before she comes back in.”
I swallowed. “I’m sorry, Dad.”
He finally looked me in the eyes, and there was so much disappointment on his face that tears blurred my vision. He swallowed and his mouth was sad when he said, “You have no idea what you just did, kid.”
As soon as we got to my mom’s house, she launched into a forty-five-minute tirade about how irresponsible I was. Apparently she wasn’t concerned about her husband or puggle sleeping, because she yelled the house down.
She took my phone and told me I was more grounded than anyone had ever been. No friends, no phone, no library, no car—I was essentially under house arrest. I could walk to school and back and that was it.
She grounded me from reading.
Seriously.
“I removed all the books from your bedroom, and don’t even think about checking anything out from the library.” She’d crossed her arms and looked disgusted by me when she said, “It’s a bizarre thing for a parent to have to do, but I think you’d be happy in solitary confinement if you had a book to read.”
She changed the Wi-Fi password so I couldn’t go online at all, and she told me she’d called Boystown to get all the details on how to send a “troubled” child to live there for a while. I knew she was just blowing smoke, but when my mom got in a rage you just never knew what she’d do.
And I couldn’t blame her for being mad. I mean, I had crashed at grandma’s without telling anyone, making them freak out and worry and spend hours calling everyone I knew.
I went to bed, but sleep was elusive. There was so much pinging around in my brain that the power button was totally stuck in the on position.
First of all, I couldn’t stop wondering why. Why had I experienced that cosmic anomaly, that it-isn’t-possible movie-plot repeating of days? Because as much as I wanted to sweep it under the rug as a blip, the reality was that it had happened.
It had.
Whether it was an altered state of consciousness—like a drug interaction or some bizarrely long dream—or the real thing, I had experienced multiple Valentine’s Days.
I wasn’t delusional.
So… why?
I tossed and turned for a while, but worrying over what had caused my bizarre experience was ultimately overshadowed by the enormous sense of impending doom. Because with every passing minute, I remembered something else—something awful—that I’d done on the DONC. Things I’d done, words I’d spoken, people I’d surely pissed off.
How was I going to go to school in the morning?
Was there a way to change my appearance so no one would recognize me? Could I switch schools before tomorrow morning? I buried my face in my pillow and groaned because, short of a violent accident, there was no way my mother would give me a break on school.
And that wasn’t an exaggeration.
I could be projectile vomiting in the morning and she’d tell me that I should just grab a Ziploc to spew into during my classes. Every time you hurl, Emilie, think about how you could’ve avoided this situation. It’ll be a good lesson.
There was no way of getting out of it. I was going to have to go to school and be destroyed by the entire student body of Hazelwood High School. Lauren, Lallie, and Nicole were going to annihilate me in some sort of public spectacle, and no one in the entire school was foolish enough to jeopardize their own social status by going against those girls to support me.
Everyone else would pile on to save their own asses. And who could blame them?
And I had no idea what to expect with Nick.
Just thinking about him on the side of the house made me light-headed. It’d been a perfect day with him, ending on a perfectly hot seven-minute make-out, but every second of it had been framed with a DONC expiration date.
What was going to happen the day after? Would he pretend it’d never happened, or would he be the same with me as he was on the roof of his brother’s old apartment building?
I don’t know what time I finally fell asleep, but at three fifteen I was still lying there, rotating between swoony recollections of Nick Stark and nightmarish imaginings of what was awaiting me at school.
When I woke up at six, I got out of bed and went straight downstairs without consulting my planner. Screw the planner.
The house was quiet and deserted, and I immediately started practicing my argument because I had to be brave. After school I had to find a way to get my mom to listen. I wanted my dad to be right about her not having enough to warrant an amendment, but my stomach clenched as I worried about what they didn’t yet know.
Would she have grounds if she found out about my reckless-driving ticket?
I couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to go to my dad’s; his house felt more like home than my mom’s. Even if he moved and left me behind, I knew he’d send plane tickets so I could visit all the time. But if my mom convinced the judge that he was a bad influence, God only knew how often—if ever—I’d be able to see him until I was eighteen.
I unloaded the dishwasher, put in a load of laundry, and got ready for school. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t spend extra time on hair and makeup that morning. I wanted Nick to give me that look when I walked into Chemistry, and if mascara and lip gloss could make it happen, I was all about it.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize until it was time to leave that since I didn’t have my phone, I couldn’t ask Roxane or Chris for a ride. I was going to have to walk to school, and that sounded positively awful.
I looked at the thermometer outside of the kitchen window. Thirteen degrees.
Awesome.
